Search works

The best way to search for works is to use the search query parameter, which searches across titles, abstracts, and fulltext. Example:
Fulltext search is powered by an index of word sequences called n-grams - see Get N-grams for more details.
You can read more about search here. It will show you how relevance score is calculated and how words are stemmed to improve search results.

Search a specific field

You can use search as a filter, allowing you to fine-tune the fields you're searching over. To do this, you append .search to the end of the property you are filtering for:
The following fields can be searched within works:
Search filter
Field that is searched
fulltext via n-grams

Autocomplete works

You can autocomplete works to create a very fast type-ahead style search function:
This returns a list of works titles with the author of each work set as the hint:
{
"results": [
{
"id": "https://openalex.org/W2125098916",
"display_name": "Crouching tigers, hidden prey: Sumatran tiger and prey populations in a tropical forest landscape",
"hint": "Timothy G. O'Brien, Margaret F. Kinnaird, Hariyo T. Wibisono",
"cited_by_count": 620,
"works_count": null,
"entity_type": "work",
"external_id": "https://doi.org/10.1017/s1367943003003172"
},
...
]
}
Read more about autocomplete.